Spotlight

Spotlight is a 2015 American biographical drama film directed by Tom McCarthy and written by McCarthy and Josh Singer. The film follows The Boston Globe "Spotlight" team, the oldest continuously operating newspaper investigative journalist unit in the United States, and its investigation into cases of widespread and systemic child sex abuse in the Boston area by numerous Catholic priests. Although the plot was original, it is loosely based on a series of stories by the Spotlight team that earned The Globe the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service. The film features an ensemble cast including Mark Ruffalo, Michael Keaton, Rachel McAdams, John Slattery, and Stanley Tucci, with Brian d'Arcy James, Liev Schreiber, and Billy Crudup in supporting roles. Spotlight was shown in the Out of Competition section of the 72nd Venice International Film Festival, the Telluride Film Festival and the Special Presentations section of the 2015 Toronto International Film Festival. It was released on November 6, 2015, by Open Road Films and grossed $98 million worldwide. It received widespread critical praise, with critics lauding the performances of the cast, historical accuracy and screenplay; it won numerous guilds' and critics' association awards, and was named one of the best films of 2015 by various publications. Spotlight won the Academy Award for Best Picture, along with Best Original Screenplay, from six total nominations, making it the first Best Picture winner since The Greatest Show on Earth (1952) to win only one other Oscar. The film also won the Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture. Plot In 1976, at a Boston Police station, two policemen discuss the arrest of Fr. John Geoghan for child molestation. A high-ranking cleric talks to the mother of the children. An assistant district attorney then enters the precinct and tells the policemen not to let the press learn what has happened. The arrest is not publicized and Geoghan is released. In 2001, Marty Baron, the new managing editor of The Boston Globe, meets Walter "Robby" Robinson, the editor of the newspaper's "Spotlight" investigative team. After Baron reads a Globe article about a lawyer, Mitchell Garabedian, charging that Cardinal Bernard Law, the Archbishop of Boston, knew about Geoghan's sexual abuse of children and did nothing to stop it, Baron urges the Spotlight team to investigate.